How 2 Stanford grads made a hot new app that soared past Facebook in the App Store — while being falsely accused of sex trafficking

Joseph Lau, left, and Nikil Viswanathan of Down to
Lunch.Down to
Lunch

When Nikil Viswanathan first saw the allegations rolling in on
social media, he couldn't believe his eyes. Hundreds of people
were accusing his app of being used for human trafficking and
urging others to never download it.

Viswanathan is the cocreator of
Down to Lunch, a simple meet-up app that has become wildly
popular on college campuses. The app, which helps people
spontaneously "lunch," "chill," or even "blaze" with friends,
peaked at No. 2 on the iPhone download charts in the US in April
(it has since settled into the 40-to-50 range).

The app's rapid rise to fame represents the
Silicon Valley dream story. But a string of product woes and a
bizarre social-media attack that branded the app a tool for
people to kidnap teens show the double-edged sword of the
internet "virality" driving today's tech boom.

The start

Stanford graduates Viswanathan
and Joseph Lau built Down to Lunch last year to try to recreate
the experience of living in their freshman-year dorms, where it
seemed so easy to run into someone and get lunch, play
basketball, or do whatever.

Viswanathan had tried five
previous times to recreate this time of life (three times with
Lau), but Down to Lunch was the one that finally started to
stick, he tells Business Insider.

Here's how it works.

Down to Lunch's simple interface.Down to Lunch

The app lets you declare you are "down" for a specific activity —
lunch for example — and then with a tap send a notification out
to all your friends nearby. They can join the "event" if they are
free, and then you can chat about the details. It's a way of
spontaneously hanging out when everyone has busy schedules,
Viswanathan says.

When Viswanathan
began to work in tech after college, he noticed that he would
constantly run into old friends and they would swap the refrain,
"Hey, we should get lunch sometime." The problem was that
"sometime" was in the nebulous future, and it would never
actually get done. And when Viswanathan did have a free moment
during work hours, he would start texting friends to see who else
was free only to give up after a few "sorry, busy"
rejections.

The theory behind Down to Lunch
was that it might help Viswanathan actually have lunch with
his non-work friends for a change.

The rise

After being released to the
public about a year ago, the app started to pick up steam at
colleges — starting at the University of Georgia.

At first, Viswanathan
acknowledges, he was surprised. He and Lau had built the app in a
day and hadn’t spent much time perfecting it.

"The product was barely
functional," Viswanathan says bluntly. He acknowledges that even
today the app can be a buggy mess. But college kids loved the
concept, and even with its hobbled utility it spread to
university after university. As their app gained popularity, the
pair thought about stopping new users from joining. The two-man
team was unprepared to scale the app and knew the product needed
serious work. One of their advisers told them to just ride the
wave, so they hired a small team to try to keep up and begin to
improve it.

The human-trafficking attack

Then, out of the blue, the
human-trafficking accusations erupted. Viswanathan says they
started from a few App Store "reviews," which were screenshotted
and passed around by high-follower Twitter accounts. The reviews
were mainly made up of outlandish tales of people lured by
strangers using Down to Lunch.

Here's one:

I tapped the [Down to Lunch] button and I was innocently going to
Panera Bread when I see a strange man with a trench coat and
sunglasses right in front of me in line. It was really strange. I
sat down and expected a few friends to show up. I examine this
weirdo in the trench coat out of the corner of my eye. He was
sitting at a table with a middle aged female, and two middle aged
men …

This particular review ends with
the girl running away from these people after they try to get her
into a van using the promise of a "premium edition"
camera.

Viswanathan doesn't know
who started what he describes as a "smear campaign," but he
suspects a competitor paid thousands of dollars for it. The
accusations got a particular boost after being tweeted by parody
accounts like Dory, which can sometimes charge hundreds of
dollars for a single post,according to BuzzFeed.

The "Dory" account sharing a review.Down to Lunch

When Viswanathan saw these
reviews, he thought Down to Lunch users would immediately know
they were fake. There are many places you can meet anonymous
strangers on the internet, but Down to Lunch isn't really one of
them. Down to Lunch lets you interact only with people whose
phone number you have in your address book and who have your
phone number in theirs, Viswanathan says. In fact, the inability
to find friends from places like your Facebook is actually a
common complaint from users.

But Viswanathan soon realized his
initial assumption was wrong: People didn't immediately conclude
that the reviews were fake. The reviews spread like wildfire on
social media, and the app lost 90% of its user growth in less
than 48 hours.

When Viswanathan spoke with a
crisis PR representative, she asked her daughter, a student at
Dartmouth, about the app. "Oh yeah, it's used for human trafficking,"
the daughter replied.

Viswanathan says he has been
contacted by law enforcement in multiple states about the posts.
Kirsta Melton, the leader of the human-trafficking division of
the Texas attorney general's office,told The New York
Timesthat she "looked
into the app and found no evidence supporting the
allegations."

As various organizations
(including themyth debunker Snopes) looked into it, Viswanathan and his team
started to make some headway against the accusations. Apple and
Google took down many of the reviews, and some of the Twitter
accounts that had tweeted them began to disappear.

The app surged in popularity again, reaching No. 2 in the App
Store in mid-April.

Down to
Lunch

The spam question

But that didn't mean the end of
Viswanathan's problems. As people began to invite their friends
to join that app, many on Twitter complained about spam. In early
April, Down to Lunch introduced a feature that let people send
invites to their entire address book. Viswanathan disabled it as
soon as he heard complaints.

But people on social media still
grumbled that they were getting unwanted invites from their
friends (though it was the friend's choice to send the
invite).A man named
Matthew Warciak has even filed a class-action lawsuit against
Down to Lunch in Illinois,the Chicago Tribune
reports.

"Nikil obtained the recipient's
phone numbers by scraping its users' contact lists and sending
unauthorized text messages to the phones of thousands of
consumers across the country,"the lawsuit
alleges.

Viswanathan gave Business Insider this statement about the
lawsuit:

The claim is wrong on multiple fronts, and we're really
saddened to see someone so upset about being invited to the app
by friends. Users can only invite friends one by one, and the
invite action is completely user initiated — there is absolutely
no automated messaging. After getting DTL, users loved the app,
and wanted a super simple way to get all their friends on the app
so they could use it to hang out. The invite system was built to
only to do that.

Can't stop the buzz

But these setbacks haven't
stopped top Silicon Valley venture capitalists from sniffing
around. When Business Insider employees joined the app, we
noticed that most of our contacts who were already using it were
venture capitalists.

Indeed, during a phone
conversation with Business Insider, Viswanathan had to step away
for a few minutes. A venture capitalist had shown up unannounced
at his office, Viswanathan said.

The Down to Lunch team.Nikil Viswanathan

Viswanathan's story shows the agony and ecstasy of going viral on
the internet. Viswanathan rushes to show me all the positive
feedback he has gotten from college students across the country
(he has his own cellphone number on the app, a decision he says
has him receiving hundreds or even thousands of texts a day).

But the app's popularity (and
notoriety) has made it slip out of his control. Viswanathan is
open about the technical shortcomings of the app. His team is
struggling to deal with the scale, and with how to fix a
prototype that can be buggy (sometimes to the point of
annoying users). And even though the app has become popular
despite the human-trafficking fiasco, the fake reviews keep
popping up again and again with a vengeance, he says.

What Viswanathan hopes will save
Down to Lunch is a winning concept. People want an easy way to
arrange a hangout on the fly, he says. That's why the app has
grown so much despite the failings in the product and the PR
nightmare.

Viswanathan, as is typical in the
tech industry, has grand ambitions for the app. He wants it to
become a platform to let you know what your friends are up to in
real-time. But for now, the problems of the moment are more
pressing. He says he has barely slept in three days. The team is
just trying to make sure Down to Lunch is in a place where it can
capitalize on the momentum, and not squander it.